


An ode to Life

by carxies



Series: Adronitis [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Don’t let the first two scenes scare u, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kevin gets hurt once but he okay, Life and Death au aka Andrew and Neil are Life and Death, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Slow Burn, its not as confusing as it seems, the fluff is mild, this is first part of 3parts series, would u believe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22979128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carxies/pseuds/carxies
Summary: He remembered he once liked humans. Liked them and their thinking, before they disappointed him past the point of return. Kevin Day, in more ways than one, reminded him of the old times and the old humans.That was the beginning of the downfall, Andrew should had known.-Or, Andrew and Neil agree to watch over a torn soul that is Kevin Day. It proves more difficult than they expected
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Series: Adronitis [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1651363
Comments: 10
Kudos: 59





	An ode to Life

**Author's Note:**

> I usually don't write in the past tense, so I'm sorry for all the mistakes

_I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection._  
— Clarice Lispector, from The Hour of the Star

* * *

There were no gods or monsters.

There was, however, an order to all things. There were two forces to oversee the balance of the universe, their names known and forgotten, translated into millions of languages and remembered only as Life and Death. Older than the Earth, they were complementary opposites, giving and taking since the beginning of the time.

They were neither kind or cruel, alike only in their fairness – remaining detached from everything alive and everything dead. Or so was thought.

-

Outside the realm of the humans, locked away and hidden on the Earth, a field had been divided by a fence. It was stronger than steel and stronger than stone, uncrossable. There laid two gardens with minds of their own, two houses with minds of their own.

In one of the gardens, everything blossomed. In the other, everything withered. The two gardens were the homes of Life and Death and strangely, the gardens did not reflect their owners.

Life and Death had spent millenniums with no such thing as a visit. No creature, be it an animal or a human, could walk on the bridge to the field or enter through one of the gates. Not even the two of them could cross the fence separating them, left to the eternity of loneliness.

If they could experience such emotion as loneliness, or any emotion at all. That was part of the punishment, perhaps a mercy of kind, to persist through the time like an empty shell. It was a punishment unfair, as their crime was nothing but a belief. Nothing but sympathy born of living alongside the human kind.

No one lived to remember that.

Life and Death were to meet only upon a ring of a bell, a rare signal of trouble in the human world.

That day, the bell rang and rang.

-

The day the bell rang, the exact moment it rang, Life was watering a flower that could tend itself. It needed no water and no sun, alive purely because it grew in the garden of Life. Still, Life watered the flower as it remembered humans do.

The sound of the bell, high-pitched and somehow bittersweet, echoed through the endless planes of the garden. It circled around Life, wrapping around its form like vines. It made itself known, like it was possible to overhear its song in the eternal silence of the garden.

Out of leftover naivety from the old times, Life looked up and gazed at the fence. The mist hid everything past the fence, didn’t allow Life to see beyond it. It never had.

Time neither stood nor ran in the garden. It was impossible to recall if the last time the bell rang was a century or a day ago. It shouldn’t have mattered to an ageless being.

Life crossed the bridge first, as it was a logical order of things.

That day, the bridge led to a top of a hill, standing high over the city underneath it. The sun had begun its rise, rays of light slipping through the gaps in between the tall trees. On an old dusty path, a human was dying.

Life reached out. A coin emerged out of thin air, shining gold and perfectly round, the way it had been since the beginning.

Death arrived late, or perhaps too soon.

There was nothing scary about it, not the way humans liked to imagine.

Death was born out of the same wish as Life had; it made no sense why only one of them was feared. A long time ago, back when the two of them were free to roam the Earth, Life would listen to the human stories about Death. About claws and big teeth, dark capes and sharp scythe. Back then, Life laughed, because it could.

In the end, both of them were hated in different ways but with the same passion.

Together, they stood over the human man lying on the ground. Confused by the bell and yet relieved to be close again, if they could feel such things. They couldn’t.

Long had passed the times when Life and Death were anything except the force behind the order. When they tended each and every being on Earth. Upon their punishment, lowly creatures took over their responsibility to decide when something lived and when something died.

Grim reapers, the creatures were called. They were born with no heart and no soul, as not to repeat the history. For each live they took, a new one bloomed, only to be taken again. A never-ending circle.

In rare occasions, when a soul was wavering, not ready to die and not quite alive either, the grim reapers would ring a bell. Summon Life and Death to flip the coin.

The human couldn’t see them, but he sensed them.

Life wore its human form as a cloak and crouched down beside the human, a young man of tan skin and black hair. Too young to be embraced by Death. Life recognized him, the same way it recognized all the humans to ever use its gift.

Death, as it usually did, spoke first. “They have cars now, fast.”

“Then what is the reason of your tardiness?” Life asked, but passed on no judgement.

The human realm would keep on changing until it perished, evolving and inventing as long as they could. Life and Death had only minutes, seconds, to familiarize themselves with the recent developments of their true home before they had to leave. For beings of no age, for beings of eternity, ever years were just a blink of the eye.

“No human wants the Death to arrive early,” Death said, a matter of fact, a joke of sort.

Death used to be entertaining, Life remembered. Death would scare humans to show them the value of the years they were given, would mess with them and teach them. At the end of the day, it would tell Life about it, stories about poor thieves and beautiful kings. That was the beginning of the downfall, Life believed.

Life stood up and opened its palm, the golden coin glinting in the morning sun. Out of decency that was rather remembered than felt, Death too switched to its human form. It would be melancholic, to see each other as they used to for centuries, but melancholy was ripped away from them as everything else was.

Life flipped the coin.

It was, of course, no ordinary coin made by a human hand. Back when they could feel fear and yet stood fearless, they each poured blood, poured their very essence, into a mix of gold and magic older than the universe. They decided on a fox at its patron, one side of the coin adorned with the animal in its full glory and the other with its sharp skull. It was supposed to be nothing more than a token.

Before the creation of the coin, there were no wavering souls. There were no wavering souls before the punishment.

The coin fell back into Life’s hand, still spinning. It kept on spinning, although that was deeply wrong.

Death took a careful step closer, as if it couldn’t see miles and miles far. That human quirk, too, was remembered rather than needed or felt.

“Did you break it?” Death asked.

Life didn’t believe breaking the coin was possible, as it was blessed back in the beginning, forged from the powers that might have created the Earth itself. However, the coin kept on spinning. The human kept on gasping for air; not catching it and not running out of it either. His soul was still in his body but it wasn’t attached to it.

“His soul is torn,” Life said and closed its fingers around the coin. It kept on spinning.

“All souls are,” Death said¸ though it was clear neither of them understood the phenomenon in front of them.

“Not this way.”

Death hummed.

Back then, before, they had selected their features rather carelessly, able to modify whatever they wished at any time. After the punishment, their human forms stuck with them, unchanging if they chose to wear them.

Life felt stifled in its own form, caged in the skin. The humans grew taller than in the ancient times and towered over Life. They towered over Death, too, but never as much. Somehow, Life found that inappropriate. A fraction of the human narrow-mindedness had rubbed on it.

Life released its grip on the coin and tossed it up in the air again. Upon landing, it didn’t stop spinning.

“He is not dead,” Life said at last. “Thus, he lives.”

“No one says thus anymore,” Death said, rubbing the extra minutes in the human realm into Life’s face. “But then what? His soul is torn; he cannot stay and he cannot go. Doesn’t seem to die anytime soon.”

Life nodded, sent the coin away.

The human coughed and curled up in himself on the ground, arms folded across chest and expression pained. Still alive.

“We save him and watch over him.”

At that, Death stepped back from the human. “How?” it asked, although it knew. They used to think alike, a long time ago.

“We follow him to the human world.”

“We are banished,” Death said. As if it was possible to ever forget.

“We are still responsible for the wavering souls,” Life said. “Until the coin decides, we watch over him.”

“We guide him,” Death said – corrected.

Life nodded, stretching its fingers. Then it kneeled by the human, placed a hand on his face. The human stopped twitching and laid still, eyes flickering shut.

Kevin Day would live. But Life already knew that when they first crossed paths, long time ago.

-

Life once used to have a name.

It was a real name, born the way humans started naming themselves much later on. It might have been Life who whispered the idea to them, just as the first rays of the sun rising above the hills hit their faces, so Death wouldn’t know.

Death knew the most about Life because Life knew the most about Death. They used to know each other’s names when no one else did, lost in the flow of time. Along the way, millenniums of separation and isolation, they forgot too.

It was time to remember once more.

-

There was no heaven or hell.

There was, however, a sunrise, symbolizing new beginnings for as long as he could remember. This beginning presented itself more like an end, a promise to be relieved of the curse of the eternity. It wouldn’t be pretty, he supposed, not the way humans imagined. There was no light to follow, no soft hand to hold onto.

He would know.

It took three shaky, unbalanced steps to cross the distance to the window. The window was opened with even shakier hands.

Human body worked in strange ways. It went against one’s judgement and was unpredictable in its reactions. It was unlike the animals’ bodies, but it was all that more fascinating to navigate. For someone who shouldn’t, technically, own a body, at least.

He didn’t attempt to sit on the windowsill in case he was to fall down, unstable in the body struggling to cage a being older than the Earth. Instead, he reached out and held his hand under the sunrays sliding in the room, letting the heat seep into his skin.

This, too, was odd. With having a body, although temporarily, came a great amount of responsibility. The body needed to be taken care of, fed and maintained, spoiled even. That he could manage. The oddest part was the simple act of being, existing in a form and shape as oppressed to a belief, a force.

The sun against the cold skin felt like a distant memory, not forgotten but repressed. The world changed. The sun did not.

There was a ton to learn, centuries of development that his least favourite creatures took credit for. They created and destroyed, invented and decided what was no longer needed. The concept of them was nothing new; they had been this way since the beginning. The did good and they did bad, each and every single one of them.

They lived.

They died, too. Death had never seemed to care who it was taking, a mother or a thief. In the end, they all had their time. They were given a stretch of time to do as they pleased, a gift they rarely thanked for. Most of them used their time to disappoint him, who lost everything for them.

It was time to remember, a voice in the back of his head whispered. Remember, remember.

Outside, the sun continued its climb up the sky, unbothered by the affairs of the living and the dead. He shared the sentiment, once.

Remember.

Organizing thoughts and memories in the human brain was a tedious process, because the brain was unable to draw a straight line. Instead, everything ran in circles, tangled rather than connected.

Remember.

He took another step towards the window, the rays of the sun falling on his face. He closed his eyes, relishing in the warmth. He could feel, physically at least, warmth and cold, wind and probably rain.

A ring echoed through the air, startling him.

It was a strange melody, strange enough to bury the panic that came with mistaking the ring for the bell. He didn’t recognize the instrument, but that much was to be expected.

Forcing his eyes to open, he followed the sound to a small little box on the table, made out of plastic and glass. The box kept on screaming and so he picked it up, turning it around in now his hands.

A picture was painted on the glass, circles of red and green along with a number. He brushed a thumb over the red button and the box piped down, the picture disappearing.

Remember.

The box began screaming again. He cursed, his words barely decipherable in his rush. He tried the green button this time. A voice spoke out of nowhere.

“Andrew?”

_Remember._

Andreios, was one of his names, given to him by the Greeks. He used to admire their intelligence and their brutal elegance, drawn to their cities and their way of using his gift. That was the beginning of the downfall, he believed.

The name had died along with them, or so he suspected. But that was the thing about old Greeks – their legacy lived on, long after their time on the Earth. The origin of the name died, but its base lived on, transformed and sculpted into a different form. Andrew would do.

He remembered.

-

Remembering was a human thing. However, trapped in a human body, he remembered. He remembered the deal – giving the gift of Life to two humans who should not exist. Except, they were no humans at all.

-

There was no bridge or a fence.

There was, however, a hospital corridor. Andrew transported there in a haze of overflowing memories, his body doing its best to absorb them all. They came in bits and chunks, thousands of years stuffed into a single human mind.

Most of them were in place when Andrew saw him.

It was anticlimactic, to meet again under bright lights of a long white-walled hall. The smell there was strong, new and unpleasant, but somehow still better than the hospitals before. There were more people healing than dying.

His oldest companion stood mere feet away, not miles and not millenniums away, only a few human steps. His human form didn’t change – it couldn’t anyway. He stuck out the way he used to, even centuries later; hair fire red and eyes brighter than the spring skies.

The human body betrayed the ban, allowed a hint of a feeling. Not forgotten but repressed, shoved deep down. It poked at his chest ever so lightly, a child’s hand against a rock. Still, it was more than the nothingness filling his soul for the eternity. It was too much.

“Do you recall?”

He was vaguely aware that the other man – not really a man – spoke the old language, nameless as they used to be before they chose to be named.

“I do,” he said.

And how strange it was, to remember.

He created them, but it was Kevin Day’s mind that made them exist. It was Kevin Day’s mind that gave them the modern versions of their names, thought them whole lives they weren’t born into.

Kevin Day gave them what he needed and what he hated, all because of a concept of them planted in his head.

-

He remembered he once liked humans. Liked them and their thinking, before they disappointed him past the point of return. Kevin Day, in more ways than one, reminded him of the old times and the old humans.

That was the beginning of the downfall, he should had known.

-

“An asthma,” Kevin said, hands thrown up in the air. In the hospital bed, buried in white sheets, the gesture looked anything but intimidating, although Kevin Day was a tall, fairly strong young man. “Can you believe? Me, having an asthma. I can’t even tell the coach that.”

“Unheard of. Truly unbelievable,” Neil said carefully, his tongue curling around the foreign language with displeasure. Still, he managed to coat his answer with enough sarcasm to earn himself a deathly glare from Kevin.

Kevin imagined Neil as his friend and rival at the same time.

Andrew believed it fitted them alright. In the short period of their first meeting, they had already fought twice. About nothing in particular. Their words crashed against each other like ocean waves crashed against the sharp cliffs, drawn to each other only to fight.

Andrew watched them from afar, where he was gingerly leaning against the plain wall. His skin itched everywhere, but especially under the modern clothes. He pushed the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows only to roll them back down. The material was a travesty of the silk he remembered.

“Suppose you will not be playing anymore,” Neil continued his taunts. No deathly glare could scare the Death, after all. “Might as well buy a nice suit and apply for some assistant position.”

The fascinating thing about Neil had always been the way he talked, his tongue sharp and his mind fast with wit.

“Andrew, take him outside, for god’s sake,” Kevin said in all seriousness.

_Andrew_. He remained unsettled in the body. The name was too heavy to add on the scale without breaking the careful balance. Referring to himself and being referred to, using pronouns the way humans did, was disorienting at best. The body came with tons of burdens and very little advantages, he discovered.

He couldn’t control his hands as well as he should had.

Neil noticed the tremor in them across the room, possibly came to the wrong conclusion about its reason. He gazed at Andrew, a question and worry written on his face. Andrew shook head at him, because that’s people had always been doing. Denying, hiding.

Andrew might had not known the world anymore, but he knew humans.

“Stop being a jerk,” Andrew said and it was unclear if he was addressing Neil or Kevin. Most likely, both of them.

He was too engrossed in observing his own hands, the dark veins under the pale skin and the small scars splattered around, mostly over his knuckles. Those were from Kevin as well.

Kevin talked some more, about how he was going to miss the practice and how Neil had to water his one and only plant. Neil, who believed he killed everything he touched, looked at Kevin with what would had been, back in the day, sadness in his eyes.

Andrew tried not to linger on it, on what was ripped from and off them, how they were left hollow when he could still remember them feeling everything there was to feel.

He failed in his attempts, just like he failed so many times before.

-

“We kill him,” Neil said after Kevin’s eyes fell shut and didn’t flicker open again, fast asleep.

The two of them loitered in the hospital, unsure if they were supposed to leave or stay. Kevin was the one to request their presence, as the first people on his list of emergency contacts. For a brief moment, Andrew wondered who it would had been if they didn’t exist.

“We do not kill him,” Andrew said.

He looked around the room and sat in one of the chairs pushed against the wall opposite Kevin’s bed. It was uncomfortable even to a non-spoiled body, the plastic cold and digging into his skin through the material of his pants. He had skin now, he had to remind himself. And pants that Kevin imagined him to like, tight and dark, pooling at his ankles.

Andrew deemed it a cruel joke.

He pondered if he should roll them up.

“Why not? He’s annoying,” Neil said.

Clearly, he was experiencing issues with the English language, as his words were pronounced just slightly off. Kevin probably wouldn’t notice. Perhaps he imagined Neil with an accent from somewhere far away.

“All humans are annoying,” Andrew said.

He rolled his pants up. It didn’t look good. With a sigh, he undid his effortful work.

Neil cleared his throat and Andrew’s eyes shot up to his face.

Neil sent him an odd look, like he was trying to convey something through it but his face didn’t quite listen to him yet, his human form as foreign to him as Andrew’s was to Andrew.

“We agreed on watching over him,” Andrew said in the old language, known to and by them only. His body wasn’t used to it. “That is the deal.”

Neil huffed and folded his arms across his chest, his form swallowed by the oversized grey hoodie. Although Andrew knew that gesture of his to be hostile, Neil appeared to be relieved to hear his mother tongue spoken again, by someone who wasn’t him.

“The deal didn’t specify that I couldn’t kill him.”

Andrew’s gaze slid to the sleeping man in question. Awake, Kevin’s shoulders were slouched under matters too heavy for a human. He was young, too young for the lines set deep in his forehead, disappearing only when he was dreaming.

Kevin Day didn’t look annoying in his sleep.

Kevin Day was a troubled man, beautiful the way only a few were and naïve the way they all were. Neil wasn’t one to appreciate a beauty and he wasn’t one to step down, Andrew knew.

“It didn’t,” Andrew said at last.

Killing Kevin Day, however, contradicted the deal Andrew made with Kevin a long time ago.

-

Lonely in his misery, Kevin Day dreamed himself two roommates. Although irritated, Andrew could understand the sentiment. And of course, that was the beginning of the downfall, just like before.

-

There were no flowers that could tend themselves or eternal silence.

There was, however, a room with a lock and dark grey wallpaper. There were bookshelves pushed against the wall and a bean chair, a double bed and a desk under the window. The room was the result of what Kevin guessed Andrew to be like.

Strangely, Kevin got it better than anyone before.

Andrew circled the room tentatively, ran his fingers over the metal and the wood, the cotton and the silk. The sensation of touch was foreign, odd.

There was a difference between slipping the human form on like a robe and actually having a body. The human form was a costume, worn in order not to scare the humans when they could still walk amongst them.

Out of habit, Andrew wondered how Neil was adjusting. _Neil_. Andrew had no reason to expect him to give Kevin his real name. He changed names as often as he changed hair colours, back then at least.

Andrew should had known better than to be disappointed to hear a new name.

After he had studied at everything, touched everything, he walked out of the room.

Upon the second, proper look, the apartment Kevin lived in was a place pleasant on the eyes. The living room, as they called it now, had big windows and very little furniture. The decision was one out of style rather than the lack of money, Andrew had learnt when he probed Kevin’s memory.

The view was what caught Andrew’s attention – miles and miles of city spreading out, in front of and underneath him. The day was bright, clear of mist and clouds. The architecture those days was ugly compared to what he was used to, but it did have its own charm.

The charm laid in the freedom the new world offered, all the roads and paths leading somewhere rather than coming to a sudden end. Finally, the human kind had figured out a way to cross the oceans as the birds had been doing, figured out how to leave the planet, even.

Andrew, all of his essence trapped in a tiny, fragile body, was overwhelmed by it all.

He wished to stay in the apartment forever, to watch the busy streets live and die, the way he used to. He wished to leave and not turn back, the way he was not allowed to.

He couldn’t do either.

Neil found him standing by the window with a possibly awed expression he couldn’t keep off his human face. If it was the case, Neil didn’t say anything about it.

Neil, too, was a being meant to exist untamed. If Andrew had spent the centuries caged, Neil had spent them chained on top of it.

Their current freedom was nothing but an illusion. There was no way to know this, meaning them coming to Earth to watch over a torn soul, was permitted by the rules set in stone somewhere. No way to know if they wouldn’t simply vanish one second, for violating their ban. Andrew had no idea if there was anyone left to listen to their, his, reasoning.

“They haven’t really changed,” Neil spoke up in the old language.

Andrew considered the statement. Humans still stole and killed, deceived and lied, thought of themselves and no one else. They hadn’t really changed.

“Do you continue to be fascinated by them?”

“Unbearably,” Neil said. “There is so much I don’t understand and so much that simply makes no sense. They make things harder for themselves but enjoy overcoming whatever obstacles they created. They pair although it ends with them wounded and they try again.”

Andrew turned to face him, unsurprised that millenniums did nothing to water down his obscure curiosity. “And yet you remain keen on watching them die.”

Neil wasn’t a creature of truth, but he didn’t deny it. “The fact I find them interesting doesn’t change the fact they are ungrateful, full of rage and violence and pettiness. They are temporary. They were always meant to be temporary.”

The light caught in the red of his hair and emphasised the high points of his face, the bone structure he borrowed from someone and the Greek sculptors loved and praised. Andrew recalled the sadness he felt when their works were destroyed, the beauty of the Death forgotten to the generations to come. Along came the stories of terrifying monster, claws and dark robes. Neil, being Neil, humoured them.

“Don’t you wish for something as simple as temporality?” Andrew asked.

Neil didn’t meet his eyes, opting to stare out of the window like Andrew did moments ago. “Being mortal. You speak of being mortal.”

His tone had an accusing bite to it, accusing Andrew of foolishness. Accusing Andrew of betrayal ancient to a human but still raw to an ageless being.

“Perhaps I am tired,” Andrew said and he meant tired of it all.

-

Andrew went to pick Kevin up from the hospital alone.

He didn’t bother asking Neil to come along and he didn’t bother asking Kevin what time he would be released. Time flew slower for humans.

Andrew sat in the hall of the hospital, nothing to do except to stare at the plain wall in front of him. That was until a human decided to approach him.

The woman was about Kevin’s age, dressed in the white robe the doctors wore those days. She sat beside Andrew with two cups of something and reached out, with the intention of handing Andrew one of the cups.

Andrew eyed the brown cup and her long fingers curled around it. When he dragged his gaze from her hand to her face, she offered him a smile.

“You have been here for hours now, haven’t you?” she asked, her voice low but clear.

“Time doesn’t mean anything,” Andrew said. He didn’t accept the cup.

“I know what you mean,” she said, not knowing a thing. “It is who we wait for that matter.”

Andrew observed her much like the first human he talked to. Andrew caught the sharp edges she softened by sheer will, although they lingered in the firm grip of her hand, the firm look in her eyes.

He accepted the cup. It was hot to touch, burning the tips of his fingers. He placed it on the floor by his feet, by the heavy boots Kevin made him wear.

“What is it?” Andrew asked.

“Hot chocolate,” she said, visibly pleased with the outcome of her courageous act. “The sugar is good for nerves.”

Andrew nodded and considered asking her if that was what doctors believed then. He decided against it. He didn’t care for medicine, a cheap means of prolonging the time to exploit his gift.

“Thanks.”

She took a sip of her own drink and gazed down at Andrew, smile still present on her face. It unravelled Andrew, the way the gesture was undoubtedly practiced but came easily.

“I hope if we meet again, it isn’t here,” she said and walked down the hall.

Her name tag read Renee and she was a human that Andrew remembered.

-

There was no Life or Death.

There were, however, three people at the dining table that evening. Andrew understood the human body enough to be aware he could not, in fact, survive purely on ice cream. That didn’t stop him from trying, much to Kevin’s disgust.

Kevin and Neil shared the preference of healthy food and they shared a rare moment of peaceful silence.

Kevin Day, however, was a human and as such, he was bound to destroy the peace in just five minutes. He did so by turning on the TV – what a weird machine that was – and finding the channel playing a game of something Andrew refused to pay attention to.

Within seconds, it became apparent that Kevin and Neil were fans of different teams. Said teams happened to play against each other the same moment Andrew was trying to decide if cookie ice cream was better than the chocolate one.

“That was an obvious foul!”

Andrew knew there was no such place as hell. It was a ridiculous concept born in the minds of those too scared to face the reality of the nothingness that came with dying. However, Andrew was sure that if humans tried hard enough, the way Kevin and Neil were right then, they would be able to create the hell themselves.

They were close as it was.

“The only obvious thing is,” Neil shouted back, mouth half-full, “That he is one clumsy piece of muscle mass!”

“Don’t speak when you don’t even reach his ankles!” Kevin barked back.

Andrew shoved more chocolate ice cream into his mouth and stared at the prominent vein on Kevin’s forehead.

If he didn’t know Neil, he would had thought the way Neil planned on killing Kevin was to give the man a heart attack. Andrew decided that would ruin the dinner and so he kicked Neil’s leg under the table. He had to stretch further than he would like to admit.

Neil yelped, but it wasn’t a sound desperate enough to drag Kevin’s attention away from the game. Neil glared at Andrew, only to be kicked again.

Neil stuck his tongue out.

A week on Earth was enough time for him to pick up the most annoying bits and pieces from the humans, their impoliteness and bad attitude.

It reminded Andrew of the old times, when Neil would mingle in the human world, catching their slang and bad words. It wasn’t surprising; Neil was there when sarcasm was born. He had been intensely entertained then.

Andrew kicked his leg again and this time, Neil huffed out what was supposed to be an annoyed sigh but ended up as a chuckle.

“You are worse than a fire in a library,” Neil muttered in the old language.

“You are worse than a lava in a city,” Andrew said back with an ease.

Kevin, against all odds, overheard the strange language over his game and shot the two of them a wary look. He didn’t ask.

One the screen in front of him, Neil’s favourite team scored. Kevin banged his fist against the table and he and Neil resumed their shouting match.

Andrew returned to his container of semi-melted ice cream.

There was no Life or Death, but there were Kevin and Neil and so it was no surprise the dinner didn’t end in a pleasant manner.

Misjudging the abilities of his body, more precisely the ability to eat and yell at the same time, Neil started choking. He startled Andrew and freaked Kevin out. Watching Kevin close to tears would had been amusing if Andrew wasn’t busy recalling how to stop a person from choking.

The whole ordeal annoyed Andrew.

Neil did not, contrary to Andrew’s annoyance, choke on his nonsense of green food. His body was fragile under Andrew’s hands, worryingly so, but Andrew managed to force him to spit the bite out and not break him in half. He could cross that off his human bucket list.

As always, he received no gratitude.

“Asshole,” Neil hissed, possibly because of his sore throat, possibly because of his default need to appear intimidating.

Andrew sighed and picked up his tub of ice cream, whatever was left of it.

Neil was okay and Kevin was pouring himself a shot on vodka, so Andrew slipped outside the apartment and headed to the roof of the building.

He had found the stairs only the other day, when he was bored out of his mind as a human with no human interests. The stairs were locked, but it didn’t mean much to Andrew. He picked up the lock and climbed up the stairs, one by one, instead of teleporting. It exhausted his body too much.

The roof seemed like nothing much until he stood up and walked to the edge. The view from there made the view from Kevin’s living room look muddy, ugly, in comparison.

Andrew discovered the roof and, on the roof, he discovered a secret.

Kevin Day, a wonderful and a terrible human, granted Andrew a wish in return for Andrew’s gift. He imagined Andrew to be afraid, terrified even, of heights. The gift of Kevin had strangely, impossibly, found a tiny hole in the wall of punishment.

Against all odds, millenniums later, an emotion sneaked through the hole and Andrew felt again.

Only the fear; everything else remained supressed deep down. The fear, however, was enough.

Andrew climbed on the edge of the roof and stood there, on the old concrete where the railing was ripped off by the wind. His chest squeezed tight and his throat closed up. He gazed down on the city, stretching in all directions. The humans were mere ants from this high, as they perhaps should had been from the beginning.

And yet, it was a human who located a crack in the spell. It was a human who gave back for what he took. It was a human, too, who brought the punishment upon them.

As if called and heard, steps echoed behind Andrew. Neil didn’t dare to step on the edge of the roof, not as far as Andrew did.

“Would I have died?”

Andrew hummed, considering the possibility while staring down at the sidewalk outside their building. Someone walked a cat there. Humans had always been idiots.

“Perhaps,” Andrew replied. “I am unsure if we can die occupying these bodies.”

What he didn’t say was his true question – how much of them was left. How much of their power could the human bodies hold. For how long.

“Want to find out?”

At this, Andrew stepped back from the edge of the roof and faced Neil. He didn’t seem shaken from the near-death experience, as ironic as it was to call the incident that. Andrew didn’t have any better words for it.

Andrew shoved a spoon full of melted ice cream into his mouth. It had warmed up, no longer hurting his teeth.

“I will push you over the edge myself if you attempt anything irrational,” Andrew said around the spoon.

Neil smiled.

Back then, it had affected Andrew. A simple smile had left him lightheaded, empty chested and yet overflowing with emotion. Now, something inside him twitched and that was it. Not forgotten, but repressed.

“I would drag you down with me,” Neil said.

Andrew believed him.

Andrew sighed and sat on the cold concrete, the spring night doing nothing to provide him with extra warmth. He already had two sweaters on.

Neil had hesitated for a moment, a moment when Andrew believed he would leave, but then slumped down beside Andrew.

Andrew pushed the ice cream container aside and licked the spoon clean. He held it in front of them both and focused on it, harder than he would have to in the garden. At first, tiny rocks grew from the steel of the spoon. Following them, soil filled in the gaps between the rocks and covered them completely, evening out the curve of the spoon.

At last, a thin stem sprung out of the soil, an inch or two long. Even in the darkness, it was clear the young bud was to be bright red once it bloomed.

Andrew sneaked a look at Neil, whose eyes were locked on the spoon and the impossible flower growing from it.

Neil reached out and stopped short of touching the plant, fingers hovering over it. The plant saddened at his proximity, began to wither. He jerked his hand back.

Andrew poked the bud and the flower bloomed, its petals perfect. The flower was a miniature version of those growing around their river, Neil had to remember.

Perhaps that was why Neil reached out once more and killed the flower with a tip of his finger.

It dried and crumbled on the spoon, the soil with its roots rotting. Andrew watched it and felt no sorrow at the death of his creation, the same way he didn’t mourn humans choosing Neil over him.

Neil sucked in a breath and opened his mouth to say something, but the words he wanted to speak never made it past his teeth.

Andrew didn’t ask.

Instead, he threw the spoon off the roof and wondered why he concluded any of this was a good idea.

-

A long time ago, a human caught Andrew’s attention. A beautiful man, powerful and thoughtful, but that was beside the point.

The man offered Andrew something in return for his gift.

-

Kevin Day, for all his nagging and complaining, was a pleasant companion when Neil wasn’t around.

He was quiet and left Andrew to his own devices. He generally avoided stupid things and dangerous things, which made babysitting him a lot easier than what Andrew had expected.

He couldn’t say the same about babysitting Neil, who went and returned as he pleased, often at odd hours, often right under Andrew’s nose.

“This one is hard to read, _apparently_ , but it sticks to the facts instead of listing speculations,” Kevin said as he handed Andrew a thick book, old but well cared for.

Andrew’s wrist buckled under its weight and placed it on the coffee table, uncaring if Kevin saw and glaring at him just in case.

Kevin ignored both.

He left Andrew to observe the history book and turned back to his bookshelf, gathering another three books. These were smaller but also even older, their pages yellowed on the edges.

“What about some new ones?” Andrew asked, out of curiosity more than anything.

Kevin shrugged. “You can find all the new books online. I keep the ones that are worth keeping.”

Andrew accepted the rest of the books and stacked them on a little pile. They looked out of place on the glass table, in the modern living room. Much like Andrew himself, dressed in Neil’s sweatpants and hoodie, as Kevin didn’t think to imagine Andrew comfortable clothes.

Kevin noticed the exchange, but kept his tongue behind his teeth about it.

Kevin regarded the books with furrowed eyebrows, lips pulled in tight line. “Do you care for Europe as well?”

Andrew’s traitorous mind jumped back, to the beautiful islands and impossibly tall temples. “I do not.”

“How American of us,” Kevin sighed. “If you need anything else, just let me know.”

Andrew settles on the sofa and crossed his legs under his body, the fabric of the sweatpants slipping past his ankles and covering his bare heels. He grabbed the biggest of the books and opened it at the first page, staring at the tiny, blurry print.

He couldn’t make the words out and so he squinted at the page.

The sound of Kevin’s tired voice startled him into shutting the book closed.

“Did you lose your glasses or something?”

Andrew looked up at him and resisted the urge to groan. As if his height wasn’t enough of a joke, Kevin imagined him blind as well.

The way Kevin looked at him was strange, suspecting Andrew of something, but all he said was, “The spare ones are still in the drawer.”

Andrew pulled the drawer under the coffee table and there was, indeed, a plain black case among the clutter. The glasses were round, its thin trim silver, and Andrew had hated the glasses at first sight. The irony was, of course, that they gave him sight.

He put the glasses on against his distaste and opened the book again. Chapter one was about dinosaurs and Andrew read it all in one sitting. When he woke hours later, both and the book and the glasses laid on the coffee table.

Andrew didn’t know who to suspect.

-

Andrew accepted the offer and even back then, he knew that was the beginning of the downfall.

-

Andrew wouldn’t had noticed it if Kevin didn’t bring his attention to it by raising his voice.

Neil had been touching Kevin; pinching him and punching his shoulder, slapping his back and kicking his shin, all the time. Andrew missed it because he wasn’t paying attention to it, foolishly so.

Neil had been touching Kevin. Kevin, although infuriated, lived.

-

There were no colosseums or gladiators.

Sometimes, Andrew thought he would miss them if he could.

There were, however, about then sweaty men running across a football field on a Sunday afternoon. Kevin was one of them. He was in his element, ordering people around and shouting at every misstep he deemed to be a fatal mistake.

Andrew watched from the side line, present only because he promised to keep an eye on Kevin. One of the men on the field happened to be the Death itself.

The Death itself happened to be hellbent on killing Kevin Day, even if it had to turn to the human means of killing.

The Death itself happened to be Neil Josten in the present time – not exactly tall, lanky man with ginger hair and sharp tongue. Andrew knew Death but he didn’t know Neil Josten, a force trapped in a human body.

More often than not, Andrew lost sight of him in the crowd of men built like mountains. It would had been amusing if Neil wasn’t actively trying to kill Kevin for the past several days.

For being the Death itself, Neil didn’t know that much about actually killing someone. He existed, after all, to oversee the process, not cause it.

Kevin came out of the little incidents with a few bruises and unclear ideas of what had happened. He believed that Neil had a bad luck and he was around to witness it – that was the funny part.

For being the Death itself, Neil was the one who suffered from his attacks the most.

So far, all of Neil’s plans ended up turned back on him one way or another, by Andrew mostly.

Neil had slipped something in Kevin’s drink. He got into a yelling match with Kevin a minute later, about Kevin’s missing socks, and the air was clear for Andrew to switch their glasses. Neil kept on throwing up for at least half an hour that evening.

Neil had attempted to mess with the electricity and got kicked by a coffee maker, his hand bright red and his hair sticking up in all directions. Andrew hid his laughter in the neckline of his sweater as he held Neil’s hand in his own, healing the idiot but leaving him some of the pain.

Andrew doubted him, of course. A human clumsiness could only take as much blame, and Neil was many things, but he wasn’t stupid. His attempts were half-assed, as if his determination to keep his word was fading.

Andrew wondered if Neil could die, if he should let Neil die instead of saving him the last minute. If things continued this way, Kevin Day would need not only protection of the Life itself but also a psychiatrist. Andrew read those were expensive these days.

Andrew didn’t feel bad for Kevin – he couldn’t feel still – but he gave his word. He promised Kevin to live until his rightful time and so Kevin would live.

Someone blew a whistle and the men rushed to gather around. In the middle of the circle, on the ground, laid Kevin. Hit in the head by the ball.

“Of course,” Andrew muttered. “Of fucking course.”

He strode over and pushed one of the men aside, earning a surprised but somehow approving hum at the strength his body held.

Andrew ignored it and knelt by Kevin’s side. He was unconscious, which meant a simple touch of Andrew’s finger was enough to heal his unfortunate headache and the bruise to form on his forehead.

The task exhausted Andrew the way it should had not, but Andrew had expected that much.

“Jerk,” Kevin coughed out the second he came to himself and opened his eyes.

Andrew sighed and looked up, his gaze finding Neil on reflex more than anything. They glared at each other over their human on the ground. Neil didn’t look apologetic at all. Andrew didn’t think he would.

With quite a bit of effort, Andrew hustled Kevin up to his feet. He allowed Kevin’s arm around his shoulders only because he felt how weak Kevin’s knees were; it was partly his fault.

“Do you need help with him?” one of the men asked Andrew.

He loomed over Andrew like a tower, but what Andrew’s body lacked in the height, it made up for with natural intimidating presence.

Andrew scowled at the man and he backed up, calling his strained goodbye and get-well-soon to Kevin from a safe distance.

Kevin clung to Andrew all the way to the parking lot to his car, Neil on their heels. Andrew had to talk to him at some point – so many incidents had to be traumatic for a human.

With a drama worth an award, Kevin unlocked the car and sank in the passenger seat. “One of you needs to drive.”

Andrew and Neil exchanged tired glances, their conflict pushed aside in the name of greater good, which was getting Kevin home and shut in his room.

Andrew remembered that both of them were able to drive, according to Kevin at least. Kevin had imagined Andrew a wallet with all the cards and documentation that Andrew didn’t bother to carry around, because why should he. He nodded at Neil and slipped in the driver seat.

He reached out and poked Kevin’s shoulder, not as much to annoy him as to gather some detailed driving experience from his memory. Kevin muttered under his breath, but didn’t straight out complain out of fear of being left behind.

Andrew started the engine.

Driving was not as complicated as humans spoke of it. Andrew told Neil that much in the old language while Kevin was staring out of the window at the buildings they were passing.

“That’s because you are not following any of the rules,” Neil snapped back, surprisingly enough in a flawless English.

Andrew shrugged and changed the lines without the signal.

-

Ages later, it was apparent the gift was nothing but poison. It poisoned Andrew with humanity, poisoned his essence with emotion and longing. A simple kiss, that was what Andrew was offered in exchange for the life.

-

On the roof, late at night, Andrew allowed himself to indulge in human acts of stupidity.

He had bought a pack of cigarettes, because he’d been curious about tabaco ever since the first time humans thought to light it. The cigarettes looked nothing like the pipes or cigars Andrew had seen. Out of all the inventions, everything made by the human hand, cigarettes and ice cream interested Andrew the most.

He was willing to add cars to the list if he found one that wasn’t Kevin’s grey sedan.

Andrew lighted the cigarette and brought it to his lips. It tasted terrible, bitter and sour and something that was supposed to be fresh. He inhaled and coughed, the body unused to the smoke in his lungs. The second drag tasted better, if only a bit. By the time Andrew stubbed the cigarette, his body was craving another.

Neil found him with the third one between his fingers.

Neil sat down without a word, close enough for Andrew to feel the heat radiating off Neil’s body against his own cold skin.

It was a nuisance to carry around extra layers everywhere. Spring was a season of treacherous weather, when the mornings were chilly and the afternoons hot enough to force one to sweat. Andrew didn’t enjoy sweating.

Andrew didn’t enjoy a lot of things about the human body.

He hated how easily they got tired; the more he slept the drowsier he felt. He hated the way a human body would betray its owner. Andrew’s ears were burning at least twice a day and he couldn’t control his hands. He couldn’t stop them from shaking when the body deemed it was feeling something Andrew did not feel.

Most of the time, his hands sweated when Neil was around.

“Why do you keep on protecting him?” Neil asked.

The city below them was slowly falling asleep, the lights dying out one by one. The ones left were the streetlights and the display cases of the shops, illuminated even during the night.

Andrew found that as strange as about everything else.

He flicked the cigarette and watched it roll on the concrete by his feet, still burning. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and clutched the material in his fists.

“Why do you keep on trying to kill him?” Andrew asked and if it was possible, he would had feared the answer.

“What kind of question is that,” Neil said, sounding as offended as he looked confused.

Andrew rolled the words around in his head, attempting to figure out a different way to pierce them together. There was none – there was no denying the reality.

“If Kevin dies, we must leave,” Andrew said. “We must return to the gardens.”

Neil didn’t reply for a long time. He gazed ahead, legs pushed to his chest and arms curled around his knees.

For the most feared thing in the universe, he looked impossibly peaceful.

Eventually, Neil reached out and picked what was left of Andrew’s cigarette. Without a second thought, he took a drag, his lips where Andrew’s had been.

Neil didn’t cough. Andrew’s heart didn’t skip a beat.

“That is true,” Neil said. “Which means you desire to stay here.”

Andrew wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t a storyteller either, and so he remained quiet.

“The only question is why,” Neil concluded.

He looked at Andrew with million other questions in his eyes, the blue of them lost in the darkness but not from Andrew’s memory.

Somewhere, a car honked.

Andrew didn’t have the answer Neil was looking for. Thousands of years later, he still didn’t have the answer.

“You despise humans,” Neil continued when Andrew’s silence had grown heavy between them. “You believe most of the things on Earth are stupid. You spend your days either in your room or here. Why would you wish to stay?”

All of his words were truthful. And yet, and yet.

“Why are you so eager to return to the prison made for us?” Andrew asked. “Why are you so eager to obey once more?”

It was a question instead of an answer, but it told Neil more than Andrew could put into words, could say in any language known to them. It was an implication of impossible, a wish that was almost as old as they were.

Neil understood it for what it was. A confession.

“How?” Neil asked.

He tosses the cigarette aside, shifting his body to face Andrew. The sweater he was wearing originated from Andrew’s closet, but neither of them cared about their human possessions enough to stress about who took what from the laundry basket in the living room. The sweater slipped down his shoulder and Andrew -

Andrew couldn’t bear to look at him.

“Kevin gave me fear,” Andrew said at last.

Neil sucked in a breath and didn’t let it go. There was a crack in the wall separating them from what was rightfully theirs, separating them from the world and their responsibilities.

There was a crack in the fence separating them.

-

Andrew didn’t love the human the way humans loved each other. He wouldn’t had called it love if any language had a better word for the feeling. But they didn’t and so love it was.

However, even if no one lived to remember, it wasn’t a love for a human that Andrew was punished for.

-

The human body came with moods. Moods, among other body functions, Andrew didn’t enjoy.

That day, Andrew woke up and his skin was on fire.

He stood under the cold water in the shower for at least an hour and it didn’t help. He ate most of the ice cream left in the container and it tasted like an ash. He picked up one of Kevin’s history books and the words bled into a big drop of ink on the paper.

As the evening approached the afternoon, Andrew understood. His body was at war with his very being, his essence and its curse against the human emotion.

It was exhausting and yet Andrew couldn’t sleep, so he decided to give the strange box called television a go.

Neil walked across the living room just as Andrew paused the documentary to curse in the old language. He peaked at the screen and understanding dawned on his face.

“It is centuries too late to cry over the burned library,” he said. At Andrew’s glare, he added, “You read everything there twice, anyway.”

“The humans didn’t and it clearly shows,” Andrew managed to say.

Neil’s gaze shifted from the screen to Andrew, oddly silent for one breathless moment. Then, he laughed, like he couldn’t keep the laughter shoved in his body.

The sound of it dug its way through Andrew’s skin and flesh, settled deep in his bones and tugged at his human heart.

It startled Andrew enough to show at his face, had to, because Neil shut his mouth and gazed at Andrew with that strange worry of his.

It took a ridiculous amount of willpower to pull the mask of indifference over his shaken features.

By that time, Neil had already stridden across the living room and kneeled by Andrew’s feet. He was a lot to take in, always had been, but especially from this close. There were freckled splattered over his nose and forehead, settle touch of Kevin’s imagination Andrew had missed until then.

Neil was right there, after millenniums of a fence in between them, and Andrew’s skin was on fire.

Without a word, he bolted out of the living room, left Neil and the documentary on the other side of the locked door.

-

There were no warriors or burning villages.

There was, however, a human cry echoing through the air all the same. It carried desperation and fear with it, the song thousands of years old. It was Andrew’s lullaby during the old times, when war was as ordinary as waking up. Back then, blood was seen more often than water and Andrew had barely seen Neil.

Andrew jolted from his sheets and stumbled to the door of his room, his sleepy hands fighting with the lock. The rhythm of his heartbeat was as erratic as his breathing, coming out in small puffs of air as he rushed to Kevin’s room in the darkness.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and that too, was an ironic expression of the human kind.

Kevin lied on his expensive carpet, eyes shut and chest unmoving. Neil knelt hunched over Kevin’s unmoving body, his shoulders shaking.

Wide-eyed in horror and blinded by the night, Andrew stepped forward them, his bare feet digging in the slick, damp carpet. His gut twisted. Andrew forced himself to gulp, swallow down whatever his stomach wanted to return.

He fell to the ground next to Neil.

Neil said something Andrew didn’t catch, his hands curled in the material of Kevin’s pyjama shirt. Andrew pried Neil’s fists open and off Kevin’s body, replacing them with his own.

He refused to let his mind linger on the dampness seeping into his sweatpants and he refused to let his mind linger on the blade laying on Neil’s lap.

He closed his eyes and pressed his palms against Kevin’s chest, still warm. His heart, although weak, was beating still. Andrew pushed down harder and focused on the remains of power in his body. He thought of all Kevin was yet to do, to lead his stupid team and collect more of his old books.

He thought of the human he had once let down and he thought of Kevin giving him what he wished for when he was banished. He thought of Kevin keeping spare pair of glasses in his living room and buying ice cream without being told to.

He thought of the words of a human doctor.

He pressed down against Kevin’s chest harder, heard the man cough, and the world turned black.

-

A long time ago, a human caught Andrew’s attention. A young boy, fearful but ambitious. They sat together as they waited for the Death to arrive, Andrew lonely and the boy bruised beyond recognition.

They waited and waited, until Life pulled out the coin and flipped it without its companion. The coin spun in the air and that was the downfall of it all.

-

There were no gods or monsters.

There was, however, an order to all things. There were two forces to oversee the balance of the universe, their names known and forgotten, translated into millions of languages and remembered only as Life and Death. Older than the Earth, they were complementary opposites, giving and taking since the beginning of the time.

They were neither kind or cruel, alike only in their fairness – remaining detached from everything alive and everything dead.

Or so was thought.

As Andrew stared at the ceiling of Kevin’s room, where he stayed because Neil didn’t dare to move his sleeping body, he pondered about the stories of them.

They weren’t complete opposites, if their stay in the human realm had proven anything. They were cruel in their kindness and kind in their cruelty. They were fair by their own measures, misunderstood by the humans.

Andrew gathered what was left of him and summoned the coin.

It was spinning, still.

Andrew sent it away and fell asleep once more.

-

The coin landed in Life’s expecting palm, the skull of a fox glinting even under the cloudy skies. Life sent the coin away and reached out, took the boy’s hand in its own.

Kevin Day lived.

**Author's Note:**

> I already have 4k of the next part, which is to be focused more on Neil, but I could always use pointers and ideas !
> 
> You can also start placing bets on who was Andrew's human back in the old times :)


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